by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

No doubt the Transport Act 2000, which obliges businesses to license and pay tax upon workplace parking spaces, has helped a little bit to increase usage of our creaking public transport system.

But more importantly it has ensured that the parking spaces which used to accommodate minions from bought ledger are now likely to be available for an altogether more important class of motorist: the government’s regulatory inspectors.

Whatever you say about the government, you can’t say it isn’t taking a close interest in small firms.

Last year, state officials made three million visits to businesses.

You may have had a visit from the Department of Work and Pensions, come to ensure under the Working Time (Amendment) Regulations 2003 that none of your staff are working too hard.

Or a shadowy figure demanding to enter your premises under the Pensions Act 2004, to verify that your company pension scheme is not in as much mess as the state pension system.

Or a man from the Environment Agency, brandishing a copy of the 2003 Water Act and insisting he check that you aren’t wasting any water through dripping taps.

And after those bureaucrats drove off, you might have had the pleasure of hosting transport officials from the local authority, as they snooped around your basement looking for hidden and unlicensed parking spaces.

In fact, the nation’s workplaces have become virtually open house to any state official who fancies a nose around your premises.

Since 2000, according to the Federation of Small Businesses in its new report Inspector at the Door, 40 statutes have been passed giving officials powers to enter business premises and, in many cases, to seize goods.

Altogether there are now 340 different ways in which a business can be forced to admit inspectors of some kind or other.

It is a bewildering number, and one which makes you wonder at the opportunities for criminals to exploit the system in order to gain entry to your accounting systems and other commercially-sensitive data.

Is the besuited figure demanding entry under the Companies Act 2004 really there to check you are complying with the latest accounting regulations, or is he an opportunistic fraudster wanting to shift the contents of your bank account to somewhere in the Cayman Islands?

The more who come, the harder it is to tell.

Laughably, the growth in snooping on businesses – there are now 12,000 regulatory officials working for national government and another 5,500 employed by local government – is happening at a time when the Department of Trade and Industry claims to be slashing red tape.

The DTI recently launched a campaign which it says is going to reduce the regulatory burden on business by £1bn by 2010. Where, exactly, do the 900 new regulations introduced since 1997 fit in with this target?

Needless to say, it is the small business which suffers the most from the obligation to entertain nosey officials.

Employees of small business now spend an average of 8.9 hours a month engaged purely on complying with regulation. For the biggest firms this falls to just 1.2 hours.

One poor butcher in the north-west was made to fill out forms and pay £100 a year for a licence purely to enable him to sell packed stuffing mixes with his meat.

Strangely, there has been no complaint about the new regulations from the big supermarkets, who also have to pay the same, flat rate of £100.

For the businesses forced under by the weight of new regulation, the government has at least offered one small consolation: it is now easier to declare yourself bankrupt.

Even so, officials have somehow managed to find a way of using bankruptcy laws to impose extra burden on business.

A few months ago I received a form from the Office of National Statistics demanding my opinion on bankruptcy – did I think going bankrupt still carried a social stigma, or did I think society is more forgiving nowadays of those who have suffered a business failure?

I didn’t especially mind filling it out, but it did strike me as a little ironic when I read the small print: if I refused to co-operate with this research into bankruptcy, I could expect a stiff fine.